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5 2 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.14
boots and sweatpants, keeps her hands in the
pouch of her hoodie.
"Would you like me to walk with you?" the
escort named Jenn asks. Te young woman nods
yes.
Nate Robertson, who's 31 and a supervisor
at a call center, approaches and asks the young
woman, "Are you going to E.M.W. today?"
A year ago, he and his wife Kristin, who are
volunteer children's pastors at the Kingdom
Center Church in J-Town, were having dinner
at the Old Spaghetti Factory and walked past
the clinic. He did some Googling and has come
to the sidewalk most Saturdays since. "It's tough
because they've already made up their mind to
have an abortion," Robertson says. He talks to a
lot of rolled-up car windows.
"Te sidewalk is really icy today," Jenn says to
the client, ignoring Robertson.
"Please," Robertson says. "You don't have to
do this. Tere are other options." He asks if the
client would consider a free ultrasound next door
at A Woman's Choice instead.
"Te protestors will try to talk to you," Jenn
says to the client. "You do not have to say any-
thing back."
"Please," Robertson says.
Te young woman and her companion do not
say a word.
Te gauntlet begins a couple hundred feet
from the entrance. One man has a GoPro
camera strapped to his chest, the footage from
which he says he shows at his church, Auburn-
dale Baptist. (It sounds like his voice on the
video of the E.M.W. sidewalk scene that's on the
website for the Abolitionist Society of Louisville,
whose objective is to "shut down Kentucky's last
remaining full-time Child Sacrifce Center.")
Twenty students have made the trip from Ken-
tucky Mountain Bible College, about 150 miles
to the southeast of Louisville in Jackson, Ky.
Many hold graphic posters, the mutilated arms
and legs of fetuses next to quarters and nickels to
show scale. One of the students cries as she sings
"Amazing Grace." Once a month, parishioners
from the Cathedral of the Assumption make the
walk to Market from their church on South Fifth
Street, where they stand across the street from
E.M.W. and pray.
Te wall parts, lets through the client walking
with Jenn. Isetti, who is whistling, opens the
door.
"Adoption would be a loving choice," Durn-
ing says. "Babies are to be cared for, not thrown
away like garbage."
"We care about you!" King shouts. "No chil-
dren have to die here today!"
Tammy Gutman, 46, stands before the
waiting-room window, head down. "I just pray
these women will open their eyes," she says.
Gutman was a single mother when she had an
abortion in 1991. She says she kept that secret
buried for 17 years, until she fnally brought
herself to talk about it at church. "I thought it
was a blob of tissue," she says. "I didn't know
it had a heartbeat." She says she forgave herself
after getting counseling at A Woman's Choice,
where she now volunteers. She named the child
she never had Shawn Alexander because she's
confdent it was a boy.
Walter, in his orange vest, walks with a moth-
er and her daughter. A woman named Mary ap-
proaches with a plastic fetus in her hand. "Don't
do this," Mary says. Te mother, who is crying,
replies, "She's a baby." Mary thrusts the plastic
fetus toward their faces. "She's just a baby," the
mother repeats. Te prayer warriors call the
mother "grandma" and her daughter "mom."
"Don't kill your daughter," somebody shouts.
"Don't let them kill your grandbaby."
"I'm sorry about all this," Walter says.
It's still dark out, but one client beelining
to the front door has on sunglasses and keeps
her hood up, as if she's trying to hide from
paparazzi. Several wear headphones. One
shouts, "Get the fuck out of my way!" Another,
to Durning: "Hush! You're getting ready to get
slapped." A lineman-sized man in an Oakland
Raiders pullover practically sprints with his wife.
Her eyes stare at the pavement; his eyes bulge.
(By the time the sun has risen, the escorts' work
is done, usually at about 8:30 a.m. Te prayer
warriors hang around until 9 or so, hoping to
get through to a woman on the other side of the
waiting-room window or to change a straggler's
mind. When the scene is mostly clear, the man
in the Raiders jacket steps into the cold for a
cigarette. "Tat was crazier than I expected," is
all he'll say.)
Rudyk is with a woman in her 30s or 40s,
who holds the hand of a young child walk-
ing next to her who is sucking on a pacifer.
"Pretty chilly morning, huh?" Rudyk says. From
Second, they turn right onto Market. Clients
and their companions have packed the entryway
through E.M.W.'s doors.
"Te baby in your womb is as precious as the
one walking with you!"
"Ten fngers!"
"Tey make slime out of those babies!"
"Ten toes!"
"You men need to step up and take care of
your children."
"Steve Jobs was adopted. What if his mother
would have had an abortion?"
"Teir only concern is receiving the blood
money for killing your baby."
Kirk Powell, a 28-year-old student at the
Southern Baptist Teological Seminary, carries
a metal basket of granola bars, bottled water
and smiley-face buttons for the escorts, an
attempt, he says, to "bridge the gulf " between
the two sides. Besides Walter, who has cofee
with Powell every Saturday at the White Castle
down the street, everybody — escorts and
prayer warriors — ignores him.
E
.M.W. keeps the fuorescent lights in the
entryway turned of, to make it a little
more difcult to see in from the sidewalk
in the early-morning darkness. An employee
stands behind a window of thick glass, checks
client IDs, hands them a form on a clipboard
and buzzes them through the waiting room's
locked door. Taped to the bricks on the
employee's side of the glass: black-and-white
printouts of faces that have made threats at
abortion clinics across the country, like the im-
ages you'd see on a wanted poster. When asked
if the receptionist window is bulletproof, the
clinic's 59-year-old director, Anne Ahola, says,
"It might be." She says the prayer warriors are
"exorcising their demons out there."
Te carpeted waiting room has 33 uncom-
fortable chairs, a few small plastic pots of fake
fowers, ceiling tiles, unmemorable pictures on
beige walls. In other words, a doctor's ofce.
Te music from the speaker overhead would
be at home in an elevator. On the other side
of the main wall is A Woman's Choice, the
Christian nonproft that ofers free pregnancy
tests and ultrasounds and can put a woman
in touch with adoption agencies or maternity
homes. "Terminating a pregnancy is killing,"
says Monica Henderson, A.W.C.'s 45-year-old
director. "Tat's a fundamental diference."
A.W.C. already had a facility on the other end
of the block — plus one on East Chestnut
where mothers can work toward a GED — but
a few years ago opened a second location, next
door to E.M.W. "Visibility and availability is
the main thing," Henderson says. "We want to
make sure these women have all the informa-
tion." ("Tey jumped on the building like that
when it opened up," Ahola says.) Henderson
says, "I think a lot of people believe that a child
disrupts everything. But most things that are
worthwhile require work. It's not easy, but it's
possible."
A locked door leads to the rest of E.M.W.,
where there are rooms for ultrasounds and pel-
vic examinations. Pregnancies fewer than eight
weeks along cost $650, cash or credit, for two
Clinic escorts in orange vests on one side of the sidewalk,
prayer warriors on the other side. Shoe tips to shoe tips, no
space between them. "Guerra," says a Spanish-speaking man
who comes to the sidewalk to pray. War.
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